Sep 11, 2019 7:00 AM

The Best Place to Make Undersea Cables Might Be ... in Space

A startup plans to manufacture fiber-optic cable on the International Space Station and ship it back to customers on Earth. Easy!

Last month, the startup Made in Space gave NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine an elaborate show of its orbit-bound automation. Like the Fates pinching the thread of life, a robotic arm unspooled a thin copper wire for a self-assembling satellite dish. Nearby, a plastic bar, carved as a lattice to shrink its weight, stretched across the ceiling, demonstrating how a 3D printer might eventually crank out rods for massive solar panels. Designed for use in space, the idea is that a satellite would print and assemble its unwieldy power supply once in orbit, rather than bringing it along from Earth. In July, Made In Space received a $74 million investment from NASA to send up such a satellite, dubbed the Archinaut, in 2022.

But perhaps the most valuable product of Made in Space, at least anytime soon, lay unassuming on a nearby table: a coil of wires, stuffed inside a plastic bag, that looked like it should plug into one of the fancy 3D printers or robots around it. The wire, called ZBLAN, is a niche form of fiber-optic material that Made In Space plans to start selling in small quantities next year. The catch? ZBLAN will be produced on the International Space Station and then shipped back down for terrestrial use. CEO Andrew Rush believes that once production ramps up, it will be a “Netscape moment” for space manufacturing, referring to the early web browser that propelled private investment in the internet. NASA, keen to develop what it calls a “low-Earth-orbit economy,” hopes he’s right.

In June, NASA declared the ISS open for commercial business. The agency would remove earlier restrictions on profit-seeking activities onboard the space station. The plan came with specifics, down to price lists for renting equipment to space tourists and rules for using astronauts’ time to market products. The long-term goal, however, is somewhat hazier—to hand off the $3 billion-a-year research lab to private industry partners, perhaps, or shut it down and get a private space station up and running. In short, NASA wants to be done shouldering the financial responsibility for the ISS, so that it can instead spend taxpayer money on other things, like colonizing the moon.

For that to work, NASA needs to prove there’s money to be made in orbit and customers other than, well, NASA. One focus is space-based manufacturing. Last month, Bridenstine told the National Space Council that manufacturing would create demand for a commercial presence in orbit in “three to seven years.” Rush says the goal is to earn enough on its fiber-optic cable sales to prove itself a “credit-worthy tenant.” At least two other companies have expressed interest in using the ISS to manufacture—wait for it—more ZBLAN. And when NASA solicited plans for a private space station to succeed the ISS, Lockheed prominently featured ZBLAN manufacturing as a place to start.

Made in Space will be the first to prove that out. But what else needs to be, well, made in space? “It’s not simple. It’s not cheap. And it is hard to justify,” says Henry Hertzfeld, director of the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University. “I’ve seen paper proposals galore on the business ideas for years and years, but most of them don’t close.”

Like other orbital upstarts, Made in Space is an exception for a simple reason: NASA is currently its primary investor and customer. The company is perhaps best known for a 2014 demonstration of 3D printing in which it passed a wrench, digitally speaking, from Earth into orbit. Rush says that’s since become routine on the ISS, where astronauts have received blueprints from the ground hundreds of times to print tools and replacement parts using plastic polymers.

ZBLAN is different. It’s not for NASA. Discovered in the 1970s, ZBLAN is a strange and fickle material. A type of glass composed of heavy metal fluorides instead of the usual silica, it has absorption and scattering properties that could make it a good fit for high-end lasers and even undersea internet cables. But the material is fragile, and, because of the varied densities of its component elements, develops microcrystals as it cools, ruining its potential. On Earth, ZBLAN producers make do with large facilities that drop beads of molten glass down multiple stories, drawing out the material into strands. But so far, microgravity offers the best environment to prevent the density separations and avoid the costly crystallization. The US Air Force first tested the hypothesis in the 1990s using parabolic flights.

Made in Space has already sent up its microwave-sized ZBLAN lab on past SpaceX launches. Unlike a typical manufacturing facility, where a machine gets loaded and reloaded with its source materials, this one does more traveling. The precursor materials are preloaded into the lab; when it’s done churning out cable, astronauts send the machine back down to Earth with the finished fiber inside. “We try to be respectful of the amount of time astronauts have,” says Rush. “They take it out, plug in power and data, and float away.” (In the future, the company plans to station a manufacturing facility in orbit, so that only the material goes up and down.) The project remains in the research phase, producing only small amounts of fiber, but Rush says he plans to launch a bigger facility next year that can produce enough ZBLAN to sell to customers.

Even with high costs of launch and return, the math for orbital manufacturing works out, Rush says. A kilogram of material can produce thousands of meters of ZBLAN, and each meter sells for more than $100. The company says it has invested millions in ZBLAN development, none of which came from NASA.

“It might not ultimately pan out,” Rush says. “And even if it does, you can’t build something with one foundation.” Made in Space is planning to launch “four to six” other payloads in the next year to test other materials that might benefit from microgravity manufacturing.

For Bridenstine, another untapped line of business is the production of medicine. Last month, NASA launched the Industrial Biomedicine Alliance with the University of Pittsburgh. Medical research is already a core component of what the ISS does, but the idea, says Bill Wagner, director of Pitt’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is to find business models that will excite investors. Materials are furthest along—the Institute is already experimenting on the ISS with degradable metal alloys, useful for coronary stents. There’s also excitement that microgravity might delay differentiation in stem cells, widening the window for experimentation, and that the disease-speeding effects of microgravity might make the ISS an attractive place for testing drugs using so-called organs on a chip instead of humans.

Still, commercializing drugs and devices takes a big investment—hundreds of millions of dollars to support, say, a clinical trial—and the research is still nascent. Wagner thinks that kind of money will take a while to reel in; the alliance, he says, is more in the stage of gathering ideas that might start intriguing bigger investors. “I might not put down a huge dollar bet, but I’d want to keep that seat at the table,” he says.

George Washington’s Hertzfeld isn’t convinced NASA’s plans have legs; attempts to kick off space manufacturing date back to the Reagan era, after all. But there are a few reasons for optimism, he says. One is that the ZBLAN plans involve improving a product already on the market on Earth, rather than trying to generate demand from scratch. Then there’s the nascent orbital economy: companies already involved in launching and ferrying payloads to the ISS, and in designing the facilities and robots. Plus, there are opportunities for satellite maintenance and tourism that could help justify a stable human presence in orbit.

What’s still unclear is whether all those things in combination will be enough to justify the enormous cost of either maintaining the ISS or building a commercial alternative, as the Trump administration hopes. The clock, meanwhile, is ticking on the 21-year-old ISS, which is starting to show its age. “There are children alive today for whom every moment there has been a human living in space,” Rush says. “It would be a shame to see that chain broken.”